


but i got my fingers laced together and i made a little prison

by illuminatedcities



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Captivity, Dark, F/F, F/M, M/M, Memory Loss, Post-Episode: s04e22 YHWH, brain washing, mentions of past trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 16:44:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5097854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illuminatedcities/pseuds/illuminatedcities
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Your name is Sameen Shaw. You have a family. Their names are Harold and John and Lionel, and there’s a dog, too - its name is Bear, and I think you probably like him best. You like guns and steaks and firefights and riding motorcycles. You had a partner once, but he died. His name was Cole.”</p><p>Root considers quantum theory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	but i got my fingers laced together and i made a little prison

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to my fab beta squad: Dana for making me understand what I was even writing about, Sky for seeing all the little details as usual & Daisy for email squeeing. <3 You guys rock. 
> 
> Title from “Yellow Flicker Beat” by Lorde.

Every universe is just this: A flip of the coin, a roll of the dice, a converging road, yes/no.

Root sketches the pathways out on the tapestry in black marker, event A and B and C and what derived from them, a dozen different ways she doesn’t _lose_ her. Her hands are covered in black ink and her mind is spinning with the possibilities.

If there is a universe where Shaw doesn’t remember, maybe there is also one where she does.

If there is a universe where John gets taken by Samaritan, maybe there is a universe where it doesn’t _break_ Harold.

\--

“We’ll find her. We’ll get her back,” Harold says once, when they drop their bags onto the floor of safehouse #17, his hand on her shoulder.

Root still remembers what he said, before: about how it would drive her mad if she didn’t learn to let go, accept the inevitable.

Maybe the end of the world has changed his perspective.

“Yes,” Root says, lets the word fall into the silence between them.

\--

There’s a basement and a door with a lock on it:

A panic room, heavy, reinforced steel, soundproof and solid. The cameras are inside of the room, not out on the perimeter, the video feed goes to a monitor in the kitchen.

The woman who is not Shaw has been throwing her weight against the door, bruised her knuckles on the metal.

There is dried blood on the sheets of the cot and smeared across her knuckles.

“You should have killed me,” she snarls into the emptiness, eyes blind like the shutter of a camera.

Root’s hands hover over the keyboard.

She looks like a drawing of Sameen that got the eyes all wrong, the line of her mouth slanted to the wrong side. Root keeps staring at it to figure out where she went wrong.

_(A flip of the coin, a roll of the dice, a converging road, yes/no.)_

The coffee cup shatters against the wall with a satisfying crack.

\--

This is the end of everything, or maybe the beginning:

A hailstorm of bullets, and a god in a briefcase, Harold’s knuckles white where he is holding onto the handle.

 _I thought I could sacrifice everyone_ , Root thinks, the echo of her own voice in her head. _I really did. Win some, lose some, right? It’s for a good cause._

She doesn’t want to _die_ , really, but it would be so _easy._

Reese grabs her arm, pulls her down so a projectile swishes through the air over her head.

Why do you even _care_ , she wants to snap, but it’s in his nature, maybe, an instinct too deep to shake, like the way he throws himself bodily in front of Harold every time, suicide or self-preservation: it's not like he could _live_ without Harold.

Root looks at him and sees an asset, a chance.

Root looks at him and sees a dozen universes where it was _him_ , where Samaritan strapped him to a chair and poisoned his memories with needles in his arm, and she hates him.

God, sometimes she hates him.

\--

Harold calls her _Root_ , and maybe it’s pity, maybe it’s forgiveness, she can never tell.

(There's a part of her that knows that it's just another chess move, but she wants to believe, she wants to. Harold is all the family she has left.)

“You only say my name when it serves a purpose,” Root tells him once, patching him up where he got caught in the crossfire.

Reese is still out there, probably shooting people in the knee with a grim expression.

She wonders if he would growl at her for the way her hands press against Harold’s skin, if he would wish that the fingertips that apply the band-aids were his.

“It’s not your name,” Harold says, pale around the nose, meeting her gaze with determination.

“It’s presumptuousness.”

Root smirks.

 **“** I’m talking to a _god_ ,” she replies.

A part of her wonders if Harold thinks that she's talking about _him._

He looks at her in that way that makes her skin itch.

“I don’t think we can call her that, right now.”

Root thinks about the briefcase, the little blue light blinking on and off like a heartbeat.

“Have some faith, Harold,” Root says. “Everything will work out, eventually.”

There’s his blood on her fingers, there’s a ghost in her head:

She’s always been a liar.

\--

Every universe is born by one explosion or the other, and she wonders what it would have taken for this one to turn out differently.

They run and they hide, burning through one safehouse after the other.

She watches John’s eyes turn _soft_ when he looks at Harold, his assassin's hands shaking with fear where they are pressed into Harold’s bloody shirt.

She wonders if she looked like that, with Shaw.

\--

There’s a basement and a door with a lock on it.

Root sits in the dark kitchen and watches the woman who is not Shaw walk circles in her cell.

She doesn’t remember, not the _right_ things, just the pain and the questions and the thrumming of the same phrases in her head.

Root brings her memorabilia, familiar foods and smells, placed carefully in the middle of her cell.

The woman throws them against the wall.

Root brings Bear once, but he stays outside, baring his teeth, and Root has a hand in his neck, stroking his soft fur.

“It's okay, it's alright,” she says.

\--

Dogs are loyal to the point of self-destruction, coming back even after getting kicked, but Bear remembers the way the woman who is not Shaw crossed their paths, before:

The way she had Reese by the throat, the sharp kick she got in that made the air rush out of his lungs.

She dislocated Root's shoulder, and the way Reese took care of her after, when they were safe, the woman disappeared back into hiding, was worse than anything else: his touch gentle even when she felt the joint slip back into place under his hands, screaming in pain.

Root could see the traces of the woman's nails on Reese's skin, as if she had wanted to rip out his throat with her bare hands.

“We have to assume that Miss Shaw has been thoroughly compromised by Samaritan,” Harold said shakily another time, after the woman tried to shoot him.

He had his hands in Bear's soft fur, stroking his back. Root has never seen Harold's hands shake before.

That night, Reese punched a wall with his fist, bruising his knuckles, and when Root patched him up she fought the urge to apologize, _I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I know she's still in there somewhere._

\--

Root takes Bear upstairs with her, gives him a treat and pets him when he curls up on the dog bed.

She waits until she is back in the kitchen to sink to her knees and sob.

–

The woman who is not Shaw snarls and growls and tries to ambush her every time Root unlocks the door.

She kicks her hard in the stomach, her arm like an iron bar against Root’s throat.

(Sometimes, Root lets her, for old time's sake.)

Root touches the bruises later, with reverence, cherishing the touch even through the pain.

\--

“She doesn’t remember,” she wants to tell Harold, “She doesn’t remember who we are, what we have _been._ All she knows is that we are targets that Samaritan told her to eliminate, that we are the _enemy_ , and I don’t know what to do.”

Sometimes Root puts her under, a shot of morphine like a remedy, and bandages her bruised knuckles, feels for cracked ribs, cleans the abrasions on her face.

Once, when the woman who isn’t Shaw isn’t all the way gone yet, she grabs Root’s wrist, fingers around her shifting bones like a bracelet, like metal handcuffs:

“She’s gone, just let me go. _Let me go_.”

After, Root sits on the kitchen floor with her hands shaking.

\--

Insanity is trying the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

It’s a good thing that she never considered herself sane to begin with.

\--

Root stares at the wall.

This time, in her imagination, it’s not Shaw in the stock exchange, it’s Reese.

She lets the scene wasch over her, the gate, the button, John grabbing Harold by the lapels and kissing him, a desperate goodbye, before _pushing him_ \- but no, he wouldn’t risk Harold tumbling down, he’d tell him to go, he’d look at her, pleading, _save him, save him, save him_ , and Root has always been selfish: she would.

She wonders if Harold’s hands would clench on the metal gates, she wonders if he would scream.

(Root must have, with the way her throat was raw after, her voice almost gone, but she doesn’t remember. Root remembers everything, but from that moment only the storm of bullets remained, Shaw getting hit and falling down.)

There’s a universe where Shaw, _Sameen_ was by her side, where it was Harold in her place, the sound of the gunshots ringing in his ears.

\--

A thought exercise, just a game.

“If John came back, after, brainwashed and one of their puppets, what would you do?”

Harold considers the chess board between them.

Root tries not to let her voice break on the words.

“The human mind is stronger and more resilient than we believe,” Harold says softly.

He makes his move.

“Say there was a remedy, something to make him forget - say, the last five years. _Forget you_.”

Harold looks at her, but doesn't say anything. Sometimes she thinks that he would have made an excellent therapist.

“The only solution to corrupted memory is to reset everything to zero. Wipe his mind from every single memory including whatever things Samaritan planted there _.”_

Root knows that she has lost – two moves, maybe three, there's no way out for her in this game.

“Tell me you’d put that needle in his arm,” she says.

“Yes,” Harold says, undeterred.

His hand is hovering over a chess piece.

“Once you find a way to delete it - brainwashing seems most likely - you’d have to delete everything, years and years of memories, to restore the person you once knew,” Root says, to make the point very clear.

She's stalling, there's no way she can find a way out now. When Root closes her eyes, she can see a brief flash of the chessboard behind her eyelids.

Shakespeare was wrong, she thinks: The world is not a stage, it's a chessboard, and even though you get to play, you know it's only a matter of time until you lose.

“In this thought experiment,” Harold says, “say you found that miracle cure that deletes the last five years from his mind, including all memories of me, all that I hold dear? Is that what you’re asking? If I would erase the painful memories from his mind along with the good ones, with every reminder of me?”

Root swallows. She knows that he understood exactly what she was asking and wonders if he's stalling for time or just can't make himself _say it._

“Would I make myself a stranger to him, make him forget everything we shared? I would, if only to spare him the pain.”

Her eyes are stinging with tears. She doesn't look up at him.

“So yes, I would put that needle in his arm.”

Root reaches out to touch the back of his hand.

“ _And then one in mine,”_ Harold says, quietly, and his eyes meet hers.

Root freezes mid-motion, her fingertips hovering in the air, not touching him.

“You found her,” Harold says.

He often wins, recently.

“I found her _body_ ,” Root says.

She can almost taste the blood in her mouth.

He reaches up to take her hand, the touch startlingly intimate for a moment. When has she touched another human lately without trying to restrain them, hold them down?

Root is so, so tired, and Harold is warm and real and there, so she leans in to brush her lips against his. His hand comes up to rest against her neck, but he uses his hold to pull her back with a gentleness that makes her ache.

A lesser man would have taken advantage, but this is Harold, so he says _“No,”_ and holds her in place when she winces at the rejection.

“There are things I can't give you, parts of me that belong to someone else,” he says flatly.

Root has a sudden, violent urge to bruise her own knuckles on Reese's face, but she takes a deep breath and lets it pass. She wonders absently if he would take her to bed if it wasn't for John, let her feel something that isn't desperation, make her stop thinking. It doesn't matter.

She moves back but his other hand slides into her hair and then she lets herself sink into his hands instead, lets him tug at her seams until she folds in on herself, curls up against him and weeps.

Harold doesn’t talk, he just holds her, like he knows, _he knows._

\--

There’s a basement and a door with a lock on it.

“If multiple universes exist,” Root says once, “then there is a universe where it was John.”

“I’m sure there is,” Harold says, staring at the flickering monitor.

The woman who is not Shaw is sitting on her bed with her eyes closed, but she is not asleep.

(She barely ever sleeps, and when she does, it isn’t long until she screams.)

\--

It’s a few days later when Root returns to the darkness of their current safehouse, doesn’t turn on the light.

She hears the rustling of clothing before she sees the two figures in the hallway.

She recognizes John first in his long coat, and then sees the flash of fabric that belongs to Harold's suit.

Harold presses him against the wall, greedy, desperate, his mouth over John’s pulse point:

a steady heartbeat.

Root leaves.

\--

“Your name is Sameen Shaw,” Root says.

There is a bruise on her cheek where the woman who is not Shaw hit her, trying to get out of the door. At least the fight hasn’t gone out of her yet.

“You have a family. Their names are Harold and John and Lionel, and there’s a dog, too - its name is Bear, and I think you probably like him best. You like guns and steaks and firefights and riding motorcycles. You had a partner once, but he died. His name was Cole.”

The woman looks at the ceiling.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she says. “I don’t remember.”

“My name is Root,” Root says.

The smile on her face is painful, and it’s not because of the bruise.

“You saved my life. You saved everyone.”

“That person you keep talking about? She’s dead,” the woman spits, her hair falling into her face.

“You kissed me,” Root says, and the words nearly choke her. “I like to think that you cared about me, too.”

The woman stares at her.

“I’ll find you. I’ll get you back,” Root says.

When she walks out, she locks the door behind her.

\--

“If multiple universes exist,” Harold tells her, Scotch and another lost chess match on a Saturday night, “then I had to be the one making the decision in a few of them.”

Root looks at him.

Her head hurts, her _heart_ hurts.

Maybe they’re all dying, and too stubborn to just let it happen.

“So what would you do? If it was John in that basement?”

Harold considers the amber liquid in his glass.

“Something stupid and irresponsible, most likely,” Harold offers.

“Doesn’t sound like you,” Root says.

“The human heart is strange that way,” Harold says.

Reese is sleeping on the couch in the back with Harold’s tweed jacket spread over him.

“I’m sorry it was you in this universe,” Harold admits quietly.

He arranges the chess board for another match.

_A flip of the coin, a roll of the dice, a converging road, yes/no._

Root drains her glass.

“Only there’s a part of you that’s not,” she says. “A part that’s glad that it’s not John down there.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Harold breathes, his gaze locking on Reese on pure instinct, his hands clenching into fists.

“I'll find her,” Root says. “I'll get her back.”

 

\-- fin


End file.
